MM> G'morning Bo, 

 BS> ex-P&T means? Phone & Telegraph?

 MM> Yup - when it was all a Government department,  it ran both the 
 MM> postal and telegraph services.  

Same in this country :) Our phones is still P&T passed (Post og
Telegraft, which is the direct translation).

 MM> Single wire phone networks covered 
 MM> the long, thin country (2000x100kms or so), and Morse dealt to 
 MM> telegram delivery.  

Hmm.. I bet it's a bigger area here.

 MM> Two copper wires, teleprinters, newspaper 
 MM> facsimiles and rotary dialling persisted up into the 80's and 
 MM> 90's.  

rotary dialing means?

 MM> The last manual exchange on Great Barrier Island would have 
 MM> closed down only 5 years ago - about the same time as our last 
 MM> electro-mechanical exchange somewhere down south. 

Oh! I bet we did do that several years before that, but I assume the rest
of NZ did also do it several years before.

 BS> BTW Pulse Dialing isn't still used in NZ? The only 
 BS> thing I can think of
 BS> where they are using Pulse Dialing is in Russia.

 MM> The pace of life changed when they turned the Telegraph into a 
 MM> Telecom - but even then the cadence was cautious...

The Telco do still have the same problems anyhow :)

 BS> We did long ago go over to Sound (Tone?) dialing, but I'm having ISDN
 BS> so it's send my 0's and 1's :)

 MM> Telecom NZ tries to offer those things, but the band delivered 
 MM> aint all that broad.  Two or three competitors are racing to 
 MM> introduce wireless services, while there have been attempts to 
 MM> popularise sattelite delivery.

Sattelite for broadband.. ISDN isn't specifically designed for
broadbandings, you do get 2 x 64 kps channels + 16 kps data channel. No
delay in calling, and a fixed CONNECT on 64000 (nearly a fixed CPS too ~
8000).

 MM> The dear old solid copper pairs from sixty years ago is very hard 
 MM> to beat, however - especially when local domestic calls are free.

In this country we are charged per minute, even for calling the nighbour.

Bo


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